Thursday, March 19, 2015

They are cornering Greece

It makes me angry that they are cornering the new Greek government. It
may be that it was not tactical and not according the agreement with
its creditors (the Troika of the European Commission, the European
Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) that the Greek government presented yesterday in the Greek parliament a bill to help the poorest Greeks, and it may be that, according to the rules (who set the
rules?), it should have consulted the Troika before adopting this bill, because of their budgetary costs, but I perfectly understand why the Greek government has not done that.

The Greeks are tired of being humiliated and not being allowed to fulfill the electoral promise of helping the poorest. But
the technocrats of the Troika, who were accustomed to
commanding and being obeyed, are upset that the new Greek government does not
behave like previous governments. And the technocrats know they have a lot of power.Do they want the attempt of the new Greek government to conduct non-neoliberal politics becomes a failure? Do they want to warn the new Spanish party Podemos and those who intend to vote for it, that a government of Podemos would be a failure?It may be that the new Greek government has committed diplomatic and
tactical mistakes, but my esteem for it is much larger than for the Troika.Prime
Minister Alexis Tsipras said in Parliament, where he presented the bill to
help the poorest, that it was the first bill in five years that was adopted in
Athens rather than ordered by technocrats of the European Union. He
criticized a senior EU official who had written a letter to the Greek government saying that it should not adopt the law before consulting its international
creditors. The EU official said that the bill should be discussed first to see if it were in accordance with the agreed reforms. "Doing otherwise would be proceeding unilaterally".

According to a BBC article Tsipras told the Greek parliament: "If they're doing it to frighten us, the answer is: we will not be
frightened. What else can one say to those who have the audacity to say
that dealing with a humanitarian crisis is a 'unilateral action'?"

About Me

As a kid I liked numbers and the sound of strings. I considered studying engineering but chose social sciences because of my interest in people. I combine a theoretical interest with a practical, social approach which brought me to the sphere of policy research. I am interested in reducing the disparity between poor and rich, between the powerful and the less powerful.
In 1973 and 1982 I lived in Latin America. In the mid-1980s, I was able to create an international forum to discuss the functioning of the international monetary system and the debt crisis, the Forum on Debt and Development (FONDAD). I established it with the view that the debt crisis of the 1980s was a symptom of a malfunctioning, flawed global monetary and financial system.
I was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the European Network on Debt and Development that was established at the end of the 1980s to help put pressure on European policymakers.
In 1990, before the beginning of the Gulf War, I cofounded the Golfgroep, a discussion group about international politics comprising journalists, scientists, politicians and activists that meets regularly.
The website of FONDAD is www.fondad.org